PHANTASMATA
Melinda Kiefer Santiago and Christopher Santiago, who collaborate as Phantasmata, are collaborative partners working together since 2018. Together, the couple creates paintings, mixed media installations and performances to invoke a phantom world in defiance to fragmented late capitalism. By utilizing visionary, art brut, and all-over aesthetics alongside found materials and craft practices with eco-surreal imagery, their work critiques Western culture and calls for the re-enchantment of inner and outer nature to imagine alternative cultures of resilience. Assembling heterogeneous materials, they aim to disorient the senses and illustrate the entanglement of nature and culture.
They value community building and organize places for connection such as curated exhibitions, performance events and an interdisciplinary “Art & Consciousness” anthropology journal issue. Christopher is a self-taught artist who teaches Anthropology & Sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY as a Doctoral Lecturer, currently finishing a book about his ethnographic work with a transnational mining resistance movement in Cajamarca, Peru through Kaleidoscope, Routledge Press. They currently live and work in NYC and relish time in the woods.
SELECTED PROJECTS
Performance and Installation Images
"After the Rains", performed at "Unruly Edges", Foxtrot Farm & Flowers, Upstate Art Weekend, curated by Charlotte Woolf, 2024
Solstice Species Sashay, Interactive Parade, Flux Factory Governors Island, organized by Sally Beauty, Winter Solstice, 2023.
Solstice Species Sashay, Interactive Parade, Flux Factory Governors Island, organized by Sally Beauty, Winter Solstice 2023
Solstice Species Sashay, Parade Costume, Governors Island, Curated by Sally Beauty, 2023
Satyr's Day Spring Revelery, Performance Still, An/aeshetics, Rosekill Art Farm, Kingston, NY, 2023
Feeding the Earth Shrine, Performance Still, An/aesthetics, Rosekill Art Farm, Kingston, NY, 2022
Feeding the Earth Shrine, Governors Island, NY, 2022
Procession, Anesthetics Rosekill, Kingston, NY, Summer 2022
An/aesthetics Rosekill, Performance & Installation, Summer 2022, Kingston, NY
Plant Puppet of Dream Alliance, Self-Organized Performance Festival, Wassaic, NY, 2021
Plant Puppet of Dream Alliance, Self-Organized Performance Festival, Wassaic, NY 2021
Mutant Forest, Performance & Installation, Wassaic Project, Haunted Hamlet, 2021
Mutant Forest, Performance & Installation, Wassiac Project, Haunted Hamlet, 2021
Vampire Bat of Capitalism, Wassaic Project, Haunted Parade, Wassaic, NY, 2020
Vampire Bat, side-view, Wassaic Project, Haunted Parade, 2020
Vampire Bat and the Fox, Wassaic Project, Haunted Parade, 2020
Parade of the Species, Governors Island Exhibition, Flux Factory, Curated by Sally Beauty, 2022
Revolutionary Butterflies, Parade of the Species, Flux Factory, Governors Island, 2022
"There Is No Thought Without A Phantasm" Installation & Collaborative Exhibition at HiLo Art Gallery, Catskill, NY, 2020
"There Is No Thought Without A Phantasm," Installation & Collaborative Exhibition at HiLo Art Gallery, Catskill, NY, 2020
HiLo Installation Image, 2020
Collaborative Paintings
Meet Me in the Field, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 in.
Visionary Landscape (2), 2019, acrylic, collage on canvas, 20"h x 20"w, private collection
Visionary Landscape (1), 2019, acrylic, collage on foam board, 25”h x 26” in
Visionary Landscape (4), 2019, 20"h x 16"w, acrylic, collage on canvas
Visionary Landscape (3), 2019, acrylic, collage on canvas, 42”h x 48”w
Visionary Landscape (5), 2019, acrylic on found panel, 50" x 40" in